Not only a very clever idea (lights powered solely by gravity), but an idea being put to humanitarian use. The deciwatt.org initiative (from the London design and innovation firm therefore.com) have focused their efforts on creating useful, valuable low power devices to address those living off the grid. Check out their nearly 500% funded Indiegogo project here:
GravityLight is a revolutionary new approach to storing energy and creating illumination. It takes only 3 seconds to lift the weight which powers GravityLight, creating 30 minutes of light on its descent. For free.
Following the initial inspiration of using gravity, and years of perspiration, we have refined the design and it is now ready for production. We need your help to fund the tooling, manufacture and distribution of at least 1000 gravity powered lights. We will gift them to villagers in both Africa and India to use regularly. The follow-up research will tell us how well the lights met their needs, and enable us to refine the design for a more efficient MK2 version. Once we have proved the design, we will be looking to link with NGOs and partners to distribute it as widely as possible. When mass produced the target cost for this light is less than $5.
Why GravityLight?
Did you know that there are currently over 1.5 billion people in the World who have no reliable access to mains electricity? These people rely, instead, on biomass fuels (mostly kerosene) for lighting once the sun goes down.
The World Bank estimates that, as a result, 780 million women and children inhale smoke which is equivalent to smoking 2 packets of cigarettes every day. 60% of adult, female lung-cancer victims in developing nations are non-smokers. The fumes also cause eye infections and cataracts, but burning kerosene is also more immediately dangerous: 2.5 million people a year, in India alone, suffer severe burns from overturned kerosene lamps. Burning Kerosene also comes with a financial burden: kerosene for lighting ALONE can consume 10 to 20% of a household’s income. This burden traps people in a permanent state of subsistence living, buying cupfuls of fuel for their daily needs, as and when they can.
The burning of Kerosene for lighting also produces 244 million tonnes of Carbon Dioxide annually.
As my ambilight project has finished i thought i would share it with you. My goal was to make a frame which has a WAF, because at certain points in the livingroom you can see the sides of my tv. Its made of aluminium U-profiles with inside measurement of 12mm (15mm outside) and the top a flat strip of 15 . This because of ventilation. Drilled 100 holes of 12mm. I see a lot of people construct the ambilight with duct-tape and ti-wraps. Which, at the end accomplish the purpose. But i think when you have a nice Home theatre setup investigate a bit of more labor to make a nice frame.
Very nice frame for our Adalight ambient lighting project pack!
Adalight – DIY Ambient Monitor Lighting Project Pack. Build your own ambient-light addition for a monitor or media PC television with the Adalight project pack! This project pack is for our “Adalight” project tutorial. By running the Processing code on your computer, the halo of LEDs will follow the screen colors to provide an awesome ambient light display that adds pop to TV shows, movies or games!
A cross-stitch kit that’s also a resistor chart! Not only is this kit fun to make (and good for beginner stitchers), when it’s all done it functions as a handy resistor reference chart. This kit comes complete with everything you need to get started:
A cross-stitch kit that’s also a resistor chart! Not only is this kit fun to make (and good for beginner stitchers), when it’s all done it functions as a handy resistor reference chart. This kit comes complete with everything you need to get started:
Still can’t leave well enough alone. A few weeks ago after the IoTPrinter was unveiled (to that very catchy tune!) I decided I needed to add that functionality to my Master Control Project. I just went with the thermal printer starter pack as I didn’t need the IoTP enclosure or button.
Incorporating the Gutenbird sketch into my existing MCP sketch wasn’t too difficult, though I did make some changes here and there, to streamline things down a little. Also, I opted not to use the Adafruit Thermal library, partially since I’m using a hardware serial port on the Mega instead of a software serial port. Oh and I added a bit of code so that the lastId is saved in eeprom so it will survive reboots (as I’m never finished tinkering with this thing!).
It’s really easy to change the output of the Internet of Things Printer– the Twitter query is just one line of code you modify in the Arduino sketch. In this video I show you how to reprogram the IoTP to print Jenny Holzer aphorisms directly on my desk (although yes, I realize the twitter account isn’t run by Holzer herself).
NEW PRODUCT – Adafruit IoT Printer Project Pack “Internet of Things” printer. Build an “Internet of Things” connected mini printer that will do your bidding! This is a fun weekend project that comes with a beautiful laser cut case. Once assembled, the little printer connects to Ethernet to get Internet data for printing onto 2 1/4″ wide receipt paper. The example sketch we’ve written will connect to Twitter’s search API and retrieve and print tweets according to your requests: you can have it print out tweets from a person, a hashtag, mentioning a word, etc! Once you’ve gotten that working, you can of course easily adapt our sketch to customize the printer.
The project is not very difficult but does require some light soldering, so you’ll want to have a little experience with a soldering iron. You’ll also need a small flathead screwdriver to assemble the box. It’s also best if you’ve had a little Arduino experience so you can feel comfortable downloading the IDE and uploading our example sketch.
This pack does not contain an Arduino+Arduino Ethernet Shield, Arduino Ethernet or Ethernet cable To complete the project you will need to add either an Arduino + Ethernet Shieldor an Arduino UNO Ethernet. If you’re using an Arduino UNO Ethernet you will also need an FTDI friend or FTDI cable to upload the sketch. A plain straight-thru Ethernet cable is also required (any length)
Wanted to put the thermal printer in something, to keep it from flopping around, and noticed this cigar box. Which was the perfect size. And then I thought, hey, why not throw an ethernet arduino in there too, and make it like one of these? So now I basically have this. Right now it’s printing William Gibson’s tweets until I figure out how to get ISS pass data to it.
NEW PRODUCT – Adafruit IoT Printer Project Pack “Internet of Things” printer. Build an “Internet of Things” connected mini printer that will do your bidding! This is a fun weekend project that comes with a beautiful laser cut case. Once assembled, the little printer connects to Ethernet to get Internet data for printing onto 2 1/4″ wide receipt paper. The example sketch we’ve written will connect to Twitter’s search API and retrieve and print tweets according to your requests: you can have it print out tweets from a person, a hashtag, mentioning a word, etc! Once you’ve gotten that working, you can of course easily adapt our sketch to customize the printer.
The project is not very difficult but does require some light soldering, so you’ll want to have a little experience with a soldering iron. You’ll also need a small flathead screwdriver to assemble the box. It’s also best if you’ve had a little Arduino experience so you can feel comfortable downloading the IDE and uploading our example sketch.
This pack does not contain an Arduino+Arduino Ethernet Shield, Arduino Ethernet or Ethernet cable To complete the project you will need to add either an Arduino + Ethernet Shieldor an Arduino UNO Ethernet. If you’re using an Arduino UNO Ethernet you will also need an FTDI friend or FTDI cable to upload the sketch. A plain straight-thru Ethernet cable is also required (any length)
NEW PRODUCT – Adafruit IoT Printer Project Pack “Internet of Things” printer. Build an “Internet of Things” connected mini printer that will do your bidding! This is a fun weekend project that comes with a beautiful laser cut case. Once assembled, the little printer connects to Ethernet to get Internet data for printing onto 2 1/4″ wide receipt paper. The example sketch we’ve written will connect to Twitter’s search API and retrieve and print tweets according to your requests: you can have it print out tweets from a person, a hashtag, mentioning a word, etc! Once you’ve gotten that working, you can of course easily adapt our sketch to customize the printer.
The project is not very difficult but does require some light soldering, so you’ll want to have a little experience with a soldering iron. You’ll also need a small flathead screwdriver to assemble the box. It’s also best if you’ve had a little Arduino experience so you can feel comfortable downloading the IDE and uploading our example sketch.
This pack does not contain an Arduino+Arduino Ethernet Shield, Arduino Ethernet or Ethernet cable To complete the project you will need to add either an Arduino + Ethernet Shieldor an Arduino UNO Ethernet. If you’re using an Arduino UNO Ethernet you will also need an FTDI friend or FTDI cable to upload the sketch. A plain straight-thru Ethernet cable is also required (any length)
NEW PRODUCTS! Electroluminescent (EL) Tape/Strip Starter Packs! – 100cm – White, Green, Blue, Aqua and Red. Get glowing in seconds with our Electroluminescent (EL) Tape Starter Pack! This pack contains everything you need for your first EL tape project, even the batteries.
Tonight the first business-application of RiderNet goes into action. One of our beloved horses (Chilli) is sick. Yesterday we would be staying vigil all night outside his stall, taking turns sleeping and checking on him. From now on, we simply attach one of the MBF Mobile Cams to the stall door and we can watch over them 24/7!
Much of this work is thanks to Adafruit products, support and tutorials – so Adafruit Industries definitely had a hand in helping to save Chilli – and every horse that gets sick from now on.
RiderNet is an all-weather arduino-managed 802.11g WiFi network made from 6 exterior and 3 interior Netgear WNDR3300 WiFi routers and Arduino Mega 2560s in a mineral oil tank. The mineral oil provides temperature stabilizaiton in freezing cold and very hot conditions, an aquarium pump and heater provide circulation and heating in the winter. These will be installed around Misty Brae Farm on trees, barns and other spots to provide complete WiFi coverage of our Pony Club Center in Virginia. The electronics were inspired by Adafruit Industires, which provided all the tutorials and great parts I got the project.
After completion I took these screenshots, and dressed one of them up with a breakdown of the RiderNet components. This unit is the “Showcase Model”, as I mounted a VFD LCD and one of the new Adafruit temp/humidity sensors outside the router for exterior measurements. This one will go in the main barn, so it wont be directly exposed to rain/snow – so I figured it would be nice to have the temp/humidity of the barn displayed on the VFD. The VFD LCD working with the “showcase” router looks very nice – especially at night.
AdaVision – DIY 150 LED video wall project pack. AdaVision is our biggest project pack ever! For all lovers of LEDs and LED walls, we finally have a project pack for making your very own stand-alone mini-LED wall. This project is designed to work with Processing to display graphics demos, low rez MPEG movies, Processing sketches and animations, or a webcam but of course its all open source and documented so that you can adapt it for your own nefarious & blinky purposes.
TUTORIAL TUESDAY: Adalight – Make your own DIY Arduino-powered ambient “Ambilight”-like lighting rig. There are any number of projects for which it would be handy to animate LEDs from a PC. Not a microcontroller, but a full-on PC. Media — music and video — are a natural for PCs, and tools like Max/MSP and Processing are a natural for creating media-based software sketches. (We use “PC” here in the generic “personal computer” sense, not in opposition to Mac; Using a combination of Processing and Arduino, everything shown here runs as well on Mac or Linux as it does on a Windows system!)
As a first demonstration, we’ll build a simple “Ambilight ” clone. Ambilight is a feature of some Philips televisions that projects colored light onto the wall behind the display , synchronized with the content on the screen to create an immersive effect. The authentic Philips system is well-integrated into the TV and works from any video source. Our facsimile, being computer-driven, works specifically with media content from your PC. This means its perfect for watching Youtube, TV or Movies on your PC or playing games!
Mark Rumreich built a puzzle for his nephew Nathan. After building a small version of the “Nathan,” he decided to ratchet up the stakes with the MEGA-NATHAN. The puzzle has a grid of 4×4 toggle switches on the face of a box. A puzzle pattern is set inside the box using a matching 4×4 switch grid. The back cover is then closed to conceal the solution from Nathan. When the front switches are set to the correct pattern, an internal buzzer buzzes, and Nathan wins. Problem is, there are 65,536 (2^16) possible switch combinations. So Mark devised a series of hints that alert Nathan to the correct solution path.
NEW PRODUCT – Digital programmable LED belt kit. By popular demand, we now have a project tutorial for how to make your own programmable, ultra-blinky LED belt. Perfect for parties, raves, parades, weddings, funerals, and bar mitzvahs. Wear it with pride, wear it with blinky! Follow our soldering tutorial to build your own heirloom LED belt, and hand it down to your grandkids.
We designed this project to demonstrate how to use the digital LED strip, how to use our Atmega32u4 breakout board with the Arduino IDE and how to make a portable battery powered project that runs off of AAs. This project is not too difficult, and can be finished in a day. Some soldering experience is good since ‘free wire’ soldering is a little more difficult than soldering to a PCB, but even beginners should be able to manage. We don’t include a tutorial on using the Arduino IDE so its good if you’ve played around with the Arduino already.
You’ll also few more things to complete and power the project: a very common mini-B USB cable (for programming the belt) and 4 AA batteries for powering it. You can use alkaline or rechargeables. The belt will last for 6-12 hours depending on what designs you program in – more LEDs will drain the batteries faster.
Friday night turned into Robotics/Art night at the 2XL Makerspace. I remembered seeing this Drawbot Project, and while you can modify normal servos to be continuous rotation servos, I already had some continuous rotation servos on-hand, so we got to work. (Or play, if you prefer.)
The Drawbot consists of just a handful of parts. Here’s a list of the items we used:
Printable catalog (PDF)
FEED
